Tim:
Doug, could you talk a little bit about your role at IBM and what
it has to do, why you are at LinuxCon right now?

Doug
Balog: Yeah, absolutely, so I have a long history at IBM in the
infrastructure business, everything from our x86 Servers to our
Mainframes to now recently our Unica Products. I am the General
Manager for the business, that means accountable for everything
associated with you know from product development directions, to
strategy, to in quarter sales. So I guess as they say, the buck stops
here.

Tim:
It sounds like it.

Doug
Balog: Yeah.

Tim:
So, since we are at LinuxCon, let’s talk a little bit about the
involvement of IBM in that world, and how it ties into the POWER
architecture?

Doug
Balog: Yeah, our role here at LinuxCon is and first off I am
thrilled to be here. First off, it’s a great set of community
influencers, right, not only influencers but contributors,
maintainers, who are really setting the direction in the industry
around OpenSource. I am here for a couple of reason at LinuxCon,
first off as part of our strategy for POWER, it’s about opening
up and capturing new applications. As I like to tell folks, the
market has already chosen that new applications in most ways are
going to be written on an open stack of software. And therefore as a
server provider you can either choose for those applications to run
on your platform or not. I’ve chosen for POWER to have those
applications run and what kind of applications? They are new mobile
enablement applications, they are web enablement application, even
many of the analytics applications that are consuming sort of the
legacy data, they are being written on an open stack of software as
well too. So all those net new applications running on Linux, I want
them to run on the POWER platform when it makes sense. So first part
of my message to this audience at LinuxCon was we’re in the
POWER business to run Linux now in a very serious way and it’s
the same Linux. It’s the same Little Indian distribution of
memory that tries the same KVM, it’s the same open stack for
management, right.

Tim:
It’s not people going from one kind of architecture into
Mainframes for instance?

Doug
Balog: Gone are the days of porting, right? This is now a day of
taking what runs already and making it optimized and making it
better. So that’s the first part of the message. The other is
really talking about the formation we started about a year,
year-and-a-half ago with Google, NVIDIA, Mellanox and Tyan as the
first five founding members with a shared vision for this moment of
time we find ourselves in where the challenge of Moore’s Law,
which is the long held belief or view, I shouldn’t say
principle, that systems going through density of circuitry continue
to contribute to extra performance every two years. Those days are
gone, right? But we think through working as a collaborative spirit
and what we found with the OpenPOWER Foundation with those original
four other founding members are now 50 more that we can continue to
deliver the application thirst for performance and memory, but it’s
going to take community working together. It’s going to take
accelerators, going to take new chip companies, new system companies,
it’s going to take software optimization, that community spirit
with the OpenPOWER Foundation can deliver on Moore’s Law. So no
single company going forward will own the innovation agenda as we’ve
seen in the past CMOS Technology era.

Tim:
No, it’s been described the Open platform or the POWER platform
as the first open server platform.

Doug
Balog: Right.

Tim:
Can you explain what that means, what does that mean for Open
licensing, what is published architectures, what is the Open media?

Doug
Balog: Yeah, from one of the bold decisions we had to face in
front of ourself is we kind of talked with the likes of Google and
others was this demand for best technology and wanting choice in the
marketplace. The importance of what we’ve done in the OpenPOWER
Foundation and what we’ve agreed to is, we’ve agreed to,
similar to the arm model for mobile, we’ll license the POWER
technology to anywhere you want to license it. That not only includes
derivative rights but also manufacturing rights. So we don’t
even have to manufacture it going forward from a licensing
perspective. We’ve already seen companies formed, some great
examples are a company called Suzhou PowerCore over in China. We
don’t all have to follow the press headlines to see a lot of
the interest in China around domestic IT, both from a security
perspective but as a full transparency and in domestic IT market. So
Suzhou plans to take the Power8 technology, do some derivatives off
it to be relevant in that market, their own encryption would be an
example of that. And bring that to the China market. So again, it’s
a licensing model; at the same time we’ve released a bunch of
the technology into the OpenPOWER Foundation. Some examples of that
would be, we’ve recently released over 420,000 lines of micro
code firmware through GitHub. So that people can see, developers can
see how to build servers based on POWER in the firmware that does
anything from booting to bringing up a virtualization engine, right.
Similarly we’ve released this target side of an interface
called CAPI, this stands for Coherently Attached Processor Interface,
what does that mean? It’s basically the other end of the
high-speed bus that allows for everything from FPGAs,
field-programmable gate arrays, to NVIDIA Accelerators to memory
accelerators to flash accelerators to sort of hang off this
high-speed memory bus. I like to describe it has, in Power8 we’ve
designed the super-highway, the industry get to design the race cars
to ride on it.

Tim:
Is IBM in a good place for being part of that entire ecosystem?

Doug
Balog: That’s exactly right. And it comes back to the core
of the industry is looking for community based innovation. They are
looking for no single company sort of driving this agenda and we
think OpenPOWER provides that community-based innovation based
opportunity.

Tim:
Speaking of that, you are working with quite a few Linux vendors.

Dough
Balog: Right.

Tim:
Rather than the IBM of old that was very integrated hardware and your
own operating systems, little complications, right?

Doug
Balag: So we’ve started working with.... We have a long
history of working with SUSE and Redhat. SUSE and Redhat continue to
be great partners on

Tim:
And Ubuntu is now a big partner too?

Doug
Balog: And I was just going to say, we just added Ubuntu to the
mix, and we worked with Mark Shuttleworth and his team, obviously
they’ve got a great presence in the cloud, a great presence
around open stack and so, as we work to bring POWER to the cloud, the
public cloud, not just the on-premise cloud, it was pretty clear to
be relevant there working with Mark and the Canonical team made
perfect sense. It is about sort of building out in this open
community of software, as we’ve brought Power8 to the market at
the end of second quarter and seeing strong demand for it, had some
significant wins in the MSP space, managed service provider space.
What we’re finding is a lot of those clients use open packages,
not only in the distro, but outside the distro as well too. And so to
help respond to that we’ve put in place an IBM subject matter
expert team that can help answer questions around how well it does in
addition to IBM software, things like MangoDB and Hadoop and others
run on the platform. So it’s a whole new world and OpenSource
software that will mix distros and outside the distros are going to
be an ever growing popular choice for I think our clients.

Tim:
Last year as part of the $1 billion IBM spend in the OpenSource
world... One thing you did is you added this kind of system, these
POWER systems to work with all the power systems in Linux centers.

Doug
Balog: Yes.

Tim:
And recently you expanded that somewhat to what I call the Linux
and innovation client centers.

Doug
Balog: Right, right.

Tim:
Can you explain – those are a lot of syllables.

Doug
Balog: Yes.

Tim:
So what does that mean in reality, does that give more people,
more businesses access to actually test out, is it for porting
software, talk a little bit about what those mean?

Doug
Balog: Yeah, so a year ago my head of development Brad McCredie
was here at LinuxCon, again a great opportunity to start telling our
story and really a year ago, we were starting to sort of make the
promises of our shift to embracing Linux on the platform in a first
class manner. And so Brad was here as we’re sharing our plans
for not only KVM and Little Indian Linux, but also recognizing you
have to provide access to developers to be successful at this, it
comes down to where is your ecosystem. That’s the question from
clients I get all the time, great story: Doug, where’s your
ecosystem?

The
innovation centers, reporting centers are all part of that and we’d
announced last year several, it grew to five, it started in Beijing,
China followed by two in the U.S., New York and Austin; [Montmartre],
France, they didn’t want to be left out either and then Tokyo,
all right, also not wanting to be left out. They’ve been in
strong demand. We’ve seen great use of those facilities and the
feedback we got was, where is mine, where is mine and my city,
where’s mine and my state, where’s mine and my country.
And so as part of today’s announcement we said, let’s
just sort of blow it out, let’s go and take full advantage of
IBM footprints, innovations centers or client centers we have and
populate them all with Power8 technology and Linux.

Now
what’s going to be there? It’s going to be educational
knowledge for those who want to come in and get educated on the
platform, it’s going to be proof of technology, proof of
concept, capabilities to demonstrate to clients, to demonstrate to
partners _____9:06, the capability and it’s going to be access
to the systems to do what they need to do to get their job done. In
addition to the centers, which are now over 50, I wanted people want
to use a cloud, and so we worked with sites like [Sydox] to put up a
Power8 cloud based on Linux as a choice for developers to come in,
free of charge I think is our current offer for a short period of
time to go and do some development. And of course through our partner
World Portal, those were part of the Partner World Network at IBM.
They can come in and use another cloud that’s free of charge,
so we’re trying to make access to this wonderful technology
available. But everybody wherever they are in the world, or whether
they want to do it on-premise, through us putting technology
on-premise or they want to come to an innovation center or client
center or whether they wanted to come to the cloud, all are available
now for us to continue to build up this ecosystem.

Tim:
Now the Power8 systems were only announced last year.

Doug
Balog: Last quarter?

Tim:
Last quarter.

Doug
Balog: Yes.

Tim:
And systems are now available. Is Power8 going to be the platform
for years to come or are there major updates that we should expect –
I know you can’t speak too ahead of yourself on some of these
things, but?

Doug
Balog: Yeah, no, it’s a great question, so

Tim:
...with
new processors rather than just being a single chip.

Doug
Balog: That’s exactly right.

Tim:
So talk a little bit about that and I’ll let you close with
that if you’d like.

Doug
Balog: Yeah, that’s fine, we’ll do that. So we
announced as you said Power8 in April of this year last quarter and
then started shipping the product in volume with about three weeks to
go in the quarter and our quarters are on a calendar quarter basis.
So it was I think June 9th if I remember correctly, that started
shipping in volume. Sharing with you what our CFO has already shared
with the rest of the world, the investors was, very strong take up of
Power8 products coming out of the gate. In fact compared to our last
generation, and then you don’t always like to look backwards to
compare yourself, but it’s one metric, we saw twice the
adoption rate of Power8 in the same period of time as we saw with
Power7 in 2010, again, good indication of strong interest and strong
demand.

One
of the other interesting aspects of within that mix, this was the
strongest adoption of Linux servers within that mix with Power8, no
surprise given our focus and investment and $1 billion in the history
of where we find ourself versus 2010. So early indications are
indications of hope, right. We’ll see how third quarter comes
out, obviously I can’t talk about that, but we’re
continuing to expect to see strong demand for Power8. We’re not
done though. We’ll have new announcements around Power8 coming
out later this year as we take Power8 as we’ve said and expand
it across the rest of the portfolio, beyond the one and two socket
scale out space into more of the mid-range and high-end.

And
so I think in addition to that, taking full advantage of some of
these [Cap-E] capability we talked about, we’ll start to see
some of those accelerators perhaps come into the market later this
year. So that’s kind of in the near term roadmap and then as
you would expect beyond Power8 there is the various iterations of the
processor. We understand new technology. IBM recently announced $3
billion investment in research around silicon technology, that will
continue to yield benefits for the POWER roadmap for years and years
to come.

I just wanted to say that I was pleasantly surprised that this guy seems relatively buzzword free and seems to know his stuff. Obviously he has his corporate agenda, but I would really like more higher-ups in big companies to do interviews like this.